Many digitally encoded audio and audio-visual works are stored as data on hard-drives, CD-ROMS, Digital Video Disks (“DVD”), magnetic tape, and servers (such as, for example, and without limitation, file servers or streaming media servers) that are accessible via the Internet for users to download. Such audio or audio-visual works may be distributed over a communications channel such as, for example, and without limitation, a computer bus, a local area network (“LAN”), an intranet, and the Internet. Digitally encoded audio and audio-visual works may also be distributed over broadcast channels such as cable television channels or radio channels, or over a telephone channel as part of a telephony or other communication system. In addition, digitally encoded audio and audio-visual works may be captured or synthetically generated and distributed over a communications channel, as described above, without being stored as data in any central location. In accordance with any such distribution, data representing a media work (i.e., any one or any combination of any one or more of) comprises: (a) audio; (b) video, (c) a pictorial representation (cartoon or animation); (d) text; (e) an audio-visual work; (f) a multimedia work; and (g) meta data including, without limitation, transcripts and close captioning) resides in storage, and is transferred to a playback device.
Often when listening to a media work that is being played back, a listener will realize that he/she did not hear, or see, or understand something that was just presented. For example, if the media work is a recorded telephone message, a speaker may have spoken a telephone number too rapidly to be copied down or memorized. Or, if the media work is a lecture, the lecturer may have said something that was difficult to understand; or the lecturer may have presented a complex diagram momentarily, and immediately moved on to something else. This problem may occur when the media work is played back at a normal rate. However, if the media work is played back at a playback rate that is faster than normal (using for example, but not exclusively, Time-Scale Modification technology available from Enounce Incorporated of Palo Alto, Calif.) this problem may occur more frequently. In these situations, a listener or viewer will attempt to back up and replay a portion of the work.
One well-known technique for providing playback of an audio or audio-visual work is referred to as “streaming.” As is well known, streaming entails downloading data that represents the audio or audio-visual work, and initiating playback before the entire work has been received. One disadvantage of streaming is that from time to time noticeable gaps in audio content and/or defects in visual content occur due to interruptions in the flow of data resulting from network traffic, congestion, transmission errors, and the like. However, this disadvantage can be reduced by utilizing a data buffer within a media player that caches a number of seconds of content. In a typical implementation that provides buffering, media data flows into the buffer before it is consumed by the player.
To minimize the gaps or defects described above, the buffer must be kept reasonably full, and thus must be filled before playback commences. As a result, whenever a user skips to a new location in the media stream, including a location already played, a re-buffering interruption occurs while buffered portions of the media work are discarded, and the buffer is refilled from the media storage device. These rebuffering interruptions can be tedious and annoying since they may occur at the precise moment the user is trying to back up and replay a portion of interest. In addition, as the viewer/listener waits for playback to be resumed, he/she may lose or forget the context of the passage or the previous utterance.
One prior art method for handling a back up and review request from a user is to require the user to perform a “seek” operation. For streaming media, for example, and without limitation, the seek operation may initiate a re-broadcast of an audio or audio-visual work each time a user requests a different location, i.e., a location that is ahead of, or behind, the current playback location in the audio or audio-visual work. This prior art method has a disadvantage in that the user must wait before playback of the work begins. Another disadvantage of this prior art method in the case of back up and replay for streaming media occurs because a media server must fulfill a request to reposition, and then retransmit data that has already been sent. As a result, the server is taxed to retransmit information that the playback device or software has recently received. This causes an increase in server load during heavy use since multiple requests may arrive simultaneously, and storage access patterns and broadcast load can vary widely. As a result, the media server's capacity to serve a number of clients in a reasonable time may be limited, and network resources for such retransmission may be limited.
As one can readily appreciate from the above, a need exists in the art for a method and apparatus for solving one or more of the above-described problems.